Raunchy flex ... Christine and the Queens.
Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Guardian

At some point in the last few years, it stopped being enough for pop stars to simply have catchy songs and good hair. Now they had to be totally woke, and fluent in identity politics and intersectionality. (See: everything from Little Mix’s new album, featuring a song called Joan of Arc, to people digging through Dua Lipa and Stormzy’s archives to shame them for old tweets.) Inclusive, socially aware pop should be celebrated, but at its worst it can be a shallow branding exercise that makes the music feel like hard work.

While she is hyper-versed in matters of gender, sexuality and class, Christine and the Queens (nee Héloïse Letissier) has never made these topics heavy-going. Funny, charismatic and an obscenely great dancer to boot, she has been a tonic since she emerged on the UK music scene in 2016. Still, discussions of her identity as a pansexual, politicised woman sometimes threatened to overshadow the music. And there was a big identity shift to get your head around on her second album, Chris – the name she now goes by. The album is a compelling portrait of a woman in flux. She cut off her hair and – having declared “I’m a man now” on her debut album – leaned into a muscular femininity. Since releasing her 2014 debut, she has embraced her power and sexuality, enough to question whether the two are interchangeable – or even incompatible.

Most of the songs on Chris detail her own pleasure and how the trials of loving feel: swaggering back from a tryst salty with sweat, like a man would; the way her jaw pimples when she feels shame; begging her male and female crushes to succumb to her skin, soft with desire but thickened by pride. She slips between dominant and disempowered archetypes, eroding what listeners might think of as traditionally masculine or feminine. All of which would be academic, even alienating, if her intricate synthpop didn’t convey these qualities – lustful intent, slippery power imbalance, the overwhelming churn of self-loathing beneath your skin. Sometimes the music does it more directly than the words. While there are beautiful lyrics on the album (“To love him is to scare a mist / to make a fauna flee”), her twisty intonation can render them opaque without the lyrics sheet.

Such a close relationship between sound and intent is testament to Chris stepping up as producer. She co-produced her debut and has since claimed that her label encouraged her not to make a big deal of the fact – which, if true, indicts the gulf between the marketability of empowered female pop stars and the industry restrictions they still face. After unsuccessful sessions with Mark Ronson and Damon Albarn as producers, she fought to make her second album herself, working with session musicians from several classic 1980s pop albums.

The music is full of familiar sounds – lead single Girlfriend pairs G-funk with cartoonish giggles and moans that mirror the comic bricolage of Slim Shady-era Eminem; the smashed glass and thrusting bass on Feel So Good recalls the Art of Noise’s crude sampling – but they’re subverted by moving musical storytelling and ingenious juxtapositions.

On one beautifully innovative song from her debut, Chris paired French singer Christophe’s 1973 hit Les Paradis Perdus with lyrics and melody from Kanye West’s 2008 single Heartless. On the new album, the song 5 Dollars pulls a similar trick with no sampled source material, giving Bruce Springsteen’s hard-won heroism a luminous synth aura and a touch of musical theatre.

Christine and the Queens performing at Hammersmith Apollo, London in November. Photograph: Gaëlle Beri

From Chris’s opening song, she sets out listening as a gesture of intimacy between her and her listeners. The casual snap and darting vocals in the opening verses of Comme Si make it feel as though she’s sizing you up as a potential comrade, before a drum fill worthy of Peter Gabriel launches her into a full-throated, committed chorus. “It’s as if we’re in love,” she sings in French, “when you play me loud,” she continues in English. The middle eight is pure satisfied seduction; a salvo that draws you close, preparing to plunge you into the sensations that she sings about.

Sometimes, those are lascivious. There’s a wanton decadence to the middle eight of Girlfriend, a realm of pleasure where Dâm-Funk’s priapic keytar solo seems to map the electricity fizzing between Chris’s cries of “baby, baby, baby” and a chorus replying “touché, touché, touché, touché”. The sunken bass and Matrix bullet-time of Damn (What Must a Woman Do) evoke her calculations about what exactly she has to do to satisfy her desires, frustration singeing her voice.

More often than not, though, they’re disaffected, reflecting how even a steady sense of self can be undermined by rejection. The silvery, coiled Doesn’t Matter and its stubborn beat sound utterly dejected, even before you note the lyric about “suicidal thoughts”. The usual rush of blood in her vocals – a rarely remarked on strength – pales in The Walker, where she quivers with uncertainty. Moments of sparkling space open up in Goya! Soda!, illuminating her sense of purgatory as she fails to seduce a cavalier young man, who’s “always on my side, but never on me”, as she sings with some anguish.

The top 100 songs of 2018

Read more

In that vignette, her date laughs at the Spanish artist’s gory painting, Saturn Devouring His Son, which for her illuminates the cruel power imbalances that have defined her relationships: “Who came there to see / who is seen / and qui mange quoi [who eats what]?” It’s a gorgeous, idiosyncratic piece of songwriting that posits alienation as a potential result of the woman’s carnal appetite she otherwise sings about so proudly.

Along with the tragic What’s Her Face, about the lingering scars of bullying, this makes for a sadder conclusion than you’d expect from a record perceived as a raunchy flex. But it’s a truthful one: what if self-belief isn’t always enough, and exposing your appetite repels people? It runs counter to empowerment pop’s current doctrine – love yourself and all is well – and feels all the more truthful for it. Woke pop may be in vogue, but the kind of emotional incisiveness Chris exhibits on her second album is rare, and eternal.